


In the Dark of the Night

by wanderlustlover



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: F/M, Friends With Benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2018-01-01 04:44:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small fic set during Cath and Steve's far away past, where they only met once or twice a year, if that often, back with SEAL missions and Navy boats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Dark of the Night

**Author's Note:**

> **Challenge:** What would your character think if they woke up next to ________.  
>  **Recipient**
> 
>  

She knows he doesn’t sleep enough, knows that comes with the territory of falling into bed with a SEAL who only comes off the clock entirely just about check-out time and sometimes not at all. But what she doesn’t know is that the ninety-eight percent of the time he doesn’t sleep that doesn’t have to do with the dreams or jetlag is all her fault.

That she nudged her forehead on his shoulder. Her knee brushes against his shin. Fingers tightening on his stomach when she murmurs in her sleep. Silky hair, falling all over his chest, too much like a net of slender vines. Doesn’t breathe like anyone else in his platoons. But it really doesn’t bother him. He lays there, perfectly still, and watches her sleep once he remembers her. Cath.

The darkness of the night caught in the bowl of her cheek, like she was made to carry the starry sky and smell of the sea wherever she went. The hair in her eyes, and the faintest part to her lips, soft and easy features, and he thinks she may be the most beautiful thing in the entire world. Or the only beautiful thing left in the world.

The only thing he knows that isn’t made of blood and bullets, silence and screaming.

He stays there, floating in the darkness, like it’s a body of water, slowly sinking him, studying the slope of her cheek, as if it’s the moon above him. Unmoving, like one movement, one breath too loud, would prove she was mirage he invented to keep out the dark and the blood. Not real in the slightest.

Breathes slow and even, never waking her from the sleep of those who don’t know, who still give over to obliviousness of what he and the people like him can never forget, never out run. Envies her it, with an ache that has no definition. Wishes he could reach out and touch it to know it was real. Even if it wasn’t his. Couldn’t ever be his.

But he doesn’t want her to dissolve into the ripples of the sea they both belong to.

So he stays there, quietly, in perfectly stillness, under this pile of a slowly ripening girl, like a homeless man, who gave up having a home too long ago to know, rubbing his hands over the last ember in a can. Holding on it, until the night sweeps in like the tide to brush it all away again.

Until he’s waking up, again, softly, slowly, foreign to all he knows, on fingertips that trace the newest scars he’s acquired without questions, save that touch, that become lips tracing them instead once she figures out he’s awake. Some quirk of a breath, or twitch of his mouth or body, giving him away.

Until the night, and the morning, and every life outside the window, slides away into goading laughter and teasing tones, before giving way to shrieks and smiles, to stealing the sheets and her breath, and slowly perfectly _perfect_ moans.

**Author's Note:**

> There may be more of these coming. Tumblr has really been inspiring to think more about this time period, about Baby SEAL Steve, about Cath, about the random foreign girls [and boys] in foreign ports. We'll definitely be seeing.


End file.
